The Seasons of Trouble (26 page)

The intimidation had now reached her doorstep. Every other week, plainclothes policemen and soldiers visited Indra’s Nuwara Eliya tea estate bungalow or her sister’s apartment in Colombo. They searched the house and questioned the family about Sarva’s whereabouts, as if they didn’t know he was in jail. Some of them even followed Indra and her sisters when they took the bus to prison.

Fear sapped Indra of energy. After a long day at the court once, when she walked to the bus stop, she fainted. When she came to, a young soldier from a guardhouse nearby offered her a bottle of water. She pushed it away, asking if he was trying to poison her. ‘How can
I
trust
you
?’ she asked in Sinhala. The soldier looked hurt. He said she was like his mother. Could she think of him as her son? She had sipped the water, but not swallowed the mistrust.

After the sixteenth visit from the plainclothesmen, Sarva’s lawyers recommended that Indra approach an NGO for help. She met a group called the Nonviolent Peaceforce, an international NGO working to protect civilians from political violence. In just a few days, the NGO confirmed that Indra’s movements were being watched. They asked her to keep them informed about her activities, and offered to help deliver food to Sarva in prison occasionally.

But Indra continued to visit the prison—it was her way of keeping an eye on her son. If she needed proof that her persistence was worthwhile, she got it on 13 November 2009. It was one of those days when the prison guards would just not open the gate. Relatives had been queuing up since seven in the morning as usual, but noon came and went and still the gates remained shut. No explanation was given. People were losing their patience and hurling abuse. Indra and some others were pleading; one woman even offered a bribe. But the guards would not relent.

Finally, at three o’clock, the gates opened. Visiting relatives charged inside. Indra dashed to the wire mesh, her eyes scanning the faces for Sarva. She spotted Rooban, who she knew was Sarva’s best friend. She was about to wave when she noticed something odd about his face. His forehead seemed squashed from the top. Then she saw the other prisoners pushing against the wire mesh
and bars. Many of their clothes were ripped. She caught a woman pointing at her husband’s nose in horror. He touched it, wincing—it had snapped to the left.

When she finally saw Sarva, Indra screamed. His shirtsleeves were spotted with blood. He was supporting his lower back with one hand and clutching his abdomen with the other, as if midway through making a wobbly bow. When he looked down, saliva dribbled down his mouth; he seemed unable to close his lips. The visitors were asking what had happened. Indra couldn’t string together a coherent answer from what she heard of the replies.

Indra called the lawyers’ office as soon as she got home. A few meetings later, it became clear what had happened, why the guards had not opened the gates. After breakfast, when the Tamil prisoners had returned to their cells, Sinhalese prisoners had stormed the Tamil section and the door was locked from the outside. More than 200 Sinhalese inmates wielding clubs, hockey sticks, metal rods and chains attacked about 130 unarmed Tamils. When the Tamil prisoners grabbed the sticks and rocks being used to attack them, a full-scale riot ensued. The sinhalese prisoners stripped and beat a middle-aged man. They stuffed another’s face into the toilet bowl for so long he lost consciousness. Someone almost bludgeoned a partially sighted prisoner to death with a stone. Many inmates banged on the gates, shouting for the guards, begging them to stop the assault. More than an hour after the violence began, prison officers turned up and took the Sinhalese prisoners away without a word. The Tamil prisoners remained behind bars.

Ten minutes later, a guard called the names of seven Tamil inmates. Five of them, including Sarva, came forward, only to be set upon again by about fifty Sinhalese prisoners in the courtyard. One attacker held Sarva down by his neck and another pounded his lower spine and stomach with a hockey stick. The five Tamils were dragged to the office, and there it was the prison staff’s turn to beat them. ‘You have the balls to create a riot?!’ one baton-wielding officer shouted.

Outraged, Sarva told his lawyers that he wanted to file a fundamental rights petition accusing the prison authorities of colluding with the Sinhalese inmates to deliberately target Tamil prisoners.
Indra, too, wanted the prison officers to be punished, but could not help feeling that a petition would be futile. She knew that Sarva had learnt from Tissa that he had the right to file such a complaint. She didn’t want to discourage her son, but a petition hadn’t protected a VIP prisoner like Tissa. Any legal attacks mother and son launched would only be arrow after arrow loosed against a bulldozer.

15.

September 2009

WITH THE RAINS
, a bloodless battle began. August flooded the refugee camp with sludge and disease. Tents in low-lying areas of Zone 2 billowed in the gush of dirty rainwater and sewage.

By September, Father was bedridden with diarrhoea. He lay on a straw mat in the tent, half-conscious, exhausted. The frequent visits to the toilet were agonising; he had to lean on someone and drag himself there. Mugil accompanied him until the day he couldn’t hold it in and went all over himself. Embarrassed, he had fallen on his knees, held his face, and sobbed as Mugil had never seen. Now Bhuvi or Sanjeevan took him or, if they weren’t around, Mother did, on a rusty wheelbarrow she had smuggled in by bribing the soldier Krishan with 500 rupees. More often than not, Father didn’t last until the latrine area, and he burst into tears.

Mother, on the other hand, had hardened. She was always scolding Father, asking why he waited until the very last minute before saying he had to go. All the caretaking expected of her had calcified into a loveless efficiency. She snorted, spat and complained, walking away as if on cue when one of the children asked for food or water. In the muggy afternoons, when activity dulled in the camp and people rested, she sat outside their tent, hugging her knees, still and unmoving, not even waving away the flies from her face.

‘Are you praying?’ Mugil asked once.

‘You think our house in Point Pedro still exists?’ Mother said in a trance, as if she had not heard her daughter. ‘Remember the coconut trees in the backyard?’ Mugil had walked away, but later she wished she had hugged her mother, or taken part in her daydreams.

At the beginning, Father’s illness had seemed simple to deal with. But their visits to the camp’s primary health centre demonstrated it was much more serious. While the disease was commonplace, here in the camp its cure was not. If the doctor was in, the line wound long and looped through the tent rows. Fights broke out when someone tried to cut in. Please, it is an emergency, someone would always say. This is an emergency, too, another would reply, perhaps adding sarcastically that some people had nothing better to do than stand in line to be treated for a cold or cough. Each would point to their sick relatives and try to outdo the other’s symptoms. Eventually a soldier would appear to end the squabble and throw both families out. More often than not, only half the queue made it as far as the doctor’s office before it closed for the day.

It took Mugil four attempts to get in. Father couldn’t stand in the queue, so she waited in line and, when it was near her turn, she called Bhuvi and hung up before he answered, the signal that he should bring Father fast. As soon as the doctor saw Father, grey and drooping, he wrote a prescription. He handed it over without a word and waved them on.

‘Diarrhoea?’ the medical dispenser asked when Mugil handed her the prescription. In front of her, stacks of tablets and capsules had collapsed on a white table.

‘Yes,’ Mugil said, although what she really wanted was to scream, ‘Can’t you see?’

‘The prescription is not going to help. Give him lime juice and
kanji
to get his strength up,’ she said. ‘And fruits. Give him lots of fruits. Except mango and banana.’

Mugil couldn’t believe the woman. Lime juice? Rice gruel? Fruits? Who had access to all of that in the camp? Trucks from the Multi-purpose Cooperative Societies were allowed inside camp now, and they sold sugar, tea, biscuits, brooms, plastic mugs,
rope and other items the refugees might need. But the inmates had noticed with much consternation that most of the traders—Sinhalese and some Muslim—were selling essentials at a huge profit. A supermarket had opened, too, run by the Sathosa chain of stores, and it sold, to Mugil’s bewilderment, largely ice cream and soda. Vegetables, fruit and milk powder were rarely available, and inmates who somehow managed to get their hands on a banana or some rice resold it—illegally, as they weren’t allowed to set up shops—to make a few extra rupees. This, too, was gone in minutes, its disappearance usually coinciding with the arrival of a soldier. An orange or watermelon, even a lemon, was a luxury.

‘Where am I going to get fruit?’ Mugil snapped. ‘All we give him now is tea. We don’t even have sugar to add to it all the time.’

The lady didn’t seem to care.

‘Just give me the pills,’ Mugil said, the fight in her fading.

‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you … We don’t have the medicine in stock.’

By the end of 2009, more than half of Zone 2 had diarrhoea, triggered by abysmal hygiene and poor nutrition. The toilets overflowed, and the filthier they got, the sicker people became.

Back in the tent, Mugil tried to feed her father watery gruel, but most of it dribbled down his chin. He could not swallow; perhaps he didn’t want to. He mumbled gibberish all night and all day, and cried quietly about being a burden. They bought a tarpaulin sheet from a Sinhalese trader and laid Father on top of it. This reduced the number of trips to the toilet, but the tent smelled of shit and piss. Mugil asked the grandchildren to cheer him up, but he was too tired and bored them. ‘Periamma, is Thatha going to die?’ Amuda’s son asked Mugil. Kalai refused to sit beside him because ‘he smelt of
kakka
’ and scared her. His gaunt face looked nothing like her smiling grandfather.

Mugil needed to take her father to the Vavuniya general hospital, but as the applications for day passes to the hospital increased, the camp office grew stricter. She looked at the soldiers, busy with desk jobs, carrying firewood, even cleaning the overflowing toilets. Surely when they signed up for the Sri Lankan military, this was not what they had in mind? They would indeed always be the men who
defeated the LTTE—they would tell their grandchildren that—but they also sat in the camps for months looking into the eyes of emaciated, imprisoned men and women who loathed them in return.

In the south, however, the armed forces were heroes and the 2010 presidential election, just a few months away, was being fought in their name. The incumbent president was riding high on his historic victory over terrorism. His opponent was his former army general Sarath Fonseka, who had led the military against the LTTE, but had been fired for saying that the army had committed ‘war crimes’. Global NGOs and the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora demanded an independent international enquiry.

‘War crimes’ was not a phrase Mugil was familiar with. Sanjeevan said it could be about the attacks on civilian areas, the shelling of hospitals and no-fire zones, maybe even the army’s use of cluster bombs.

‘What about the rape of our women?’ Mugil asked.

Sanjeevan winced ever so slightly. Mugil was a little taken aback herself. The word rape was not usually used, in Tamil or English. Even when inmates spoke openly about it, they used euphemisms like ‘took her honour’ or ‘insulted’ or ‘left our women unable to show their face in public’. It irritated her every time, this dancing around the act, as if it were not a crime but just an embarrassing secret. She had used the English word
rape
, with the strong
r
, and it hung in the air. Emboldened and somewhat proud of herself, she prepared to come clean to Sanjeevan about the rapes she had witnessed in the Kilinochchi mango orchard.

‘I don’t think the NGOs will care about rapes, especially of Tiger girls,’ Sanjeevan said.

She hadn’t anticipated this. ‘Why? That, too, is breaking the rules of war, no? Like burning hospitals?’

‘But it was our fault that we had women in our militia. Otherwise this would not have happened at all. See how the army doesn’t have women? They knew that would be a weakness.’

Mugil stared at him, heat rising from her neck. He was facing the other way, stitching a patch on his shirtsleeve, and he continued, his voice unemotional as ever: ‘I am also upset that it happened,
enna
, but it is distracting us from the real issues. The army is taking
our land, men from detention camp have just disappeared, they’re trying to cover up all the evidence in Nandikadal …’

He went on, offering clever, interesting opinions, ideas she had admired earlier. It was Sanjeevan who had once said, ‘I know now how the Muslims must have felt when the Tigers forced them out of the north.’ He had called them the oldest displaced community in the country, expelled entirely from Jaffna, Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi in October 1990 by the Tigers. About 72,000 people were given two hours to leave the homes they had inhabited for generations, allowed to leave with only what they could carry. Most had walked to Puttalam, a Muslim-dominated western town, where locals had taken them in. Many still lived in settlement villages. It was unusual for a Tamil man to mention this, especially one who grew up in the Vanni. Mugil had wondered how Sanjeevan was able to acknowledge the suffering of the smaller minority group at the hands of his leaders when his own community was wrapped up in its victimhood. How had he held onto that unselfish thought? How did he preserve his empathy? Listening to Sanjeevan became Mugil’s way of seeing through the muddle of her own emotions about the movement and the Tigers.

Now she thought, looking at his lean, bearded face, that he was just like a newsreader—just saying things, feeling nothing. Rape was not a ‘real issue’ for him. What if it happened to men, she wanted to ask. Don’t you see that this is also a way of subjugating our community? What if they raped civilian girls? What if someone did that to your sister? There were so many what ifs. But what was the use?